Congratulations to the University of Washington Department of Biostatistics Class of 2026! Graduating students were recognized at a celebration on Saturday, June 6, which was attended by family, friends, faculty, and staff.
Ceremony
Professor of Biostatistics Patrick Heagerty delivered the commencement address. Heagerty is also director of the Center for Biomedical Statistics and former department chair.
"Our graduates are the leaders of the future, and quite honestly, they're leaders of the present. They've made their signature in science through their scholarship. They inspire us, they help us achieve our objectives and our goals, and we look forward to watching them evolve and progress," said Heagerty.
Student Awards
Departmental senior student awards recognizing scholarship, communication, and leadership were announced by Lurdes Inoue, professor of biostatistics and former department chair.
- Congyu Hang, Senior Student Award, MS Thesis
- Breanna Brown, Senior Student Award, MS Capstone
- Ellen Graham, Thomas R. Fleming Excellence in Biostatistics Award
- Ameer Dharamshi, Thomas R. Fleming Excellence in Biostatistics Award
Award recipients are pictured with Inoue and Ali Shojaie, Norman Breslow Endowed Faculty, professor of biostatistics and interim department chair.
The School of Public Health Excellence Award winners for Biostatistics were also acknowledged during the program. Yifan Lin received the Gilbert S. Omenn Award for Academic Excellence, and Gabriela Vasconcelos received the Outstanding Doctoral Student in Biostatistics award.
Photo Highlights
View the event photo album on our department Flickr page. Access to photos is available for a limited time.
Class of 2026
Congratulations to all of our students completing degrees in 2026. Students who graduated from the Biostatistics MS Capstone program in 2026 were recognized in a ceremony held in March.
Master of Science Thesis
Congyu Hang
- Program: MS Thesis
- Thesis: "Frontier LLM Evaluation for Clinical Trial Development"
- Advisor: Ting Ye, PhD
Yifan LIn
- Program: MS Thesis
- Thesis: "High-Dimensional Sensitivity Analysis for Genomic Studies: An Adversarial Framework for Learning Worst-Case Latent Confounders"
- Advisor: Kevin Lin, PhD
Robert Trujillo
- Program: MS Thesis
- Thesis: "Win Ratio Analysis for Composite Outcomes in Observational Cardiovascular Studies: An Application to the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and Simulation Study"
- Advisor: Robyn McClelland, PhD
Doctor of Philosophy
Ethan Ashby
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Methodological Advances in Using Negative Control Endpoints to Improve Vaccine Effectiveness Estimation"
- Advisors: Bo Zhang, PhD and Ting Ye, PhD
Angela Dahl
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Statistical Methods for Infectious Disease Prevention Studies with Varying Exposure Risk"
- Advisor: Elizabeth Brown, PhD
Ameer Dharamshi
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Inference after Selection and Prediction"
- Advisors: Daniela Witten, PhD and Jon Wakefield, PhD
Ellen Graham
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Semiparametric Inference with Incomplete Data: Data Fusion, Instrumental Variables, and Proximal Causal Models"
- Advisor: Andrea Rotnitzky, PhD
Anand Hemmady
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Continuous Exposures and Inverse Problems in Causal Inference"
- Advisor: Marco Carone, PhD
Victoria Knutson
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Statistical Methods for Excess Mortality Estimation with Variable Data Availability and Completeness"
- Advisor: Jon Wakefield, PhD
Jaewon Lim
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Estimation and inference for function-valued parameters in data fusion and multimodal settings"
- Advisor: Alex Luedtke, PhD
Albert Osom
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Statistical Methods for Biomarker Discovery and Inference on Causal Functionals"
- Advisor: Ali Shojaie, PhD
James Peng
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Statistical methods for analyzing deep viral sequencing data in HIV-1 prevention trial sieve analyses"
- Advisor: Peter Gilbert, PhD
Sungtaek Son
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Dimension Reduction Methods for Improved Estimation of Causal Parameters"
- Advisors: K.C. Gary Chan, PhD and Eardi Lila, PhD
Gabriela Vasconcelos
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Statistical Methods for Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Data"
- Advisor: Ali Shojaie, PhD
Yinxiang Wu
- Program: PhD
- Dissertation: "Causal Inference in the Presence of Unmeasured Confounding: Advances in Mendelian Randomization and Proximal Causal Inference"
- Advisor: Tinge Ye, PhD and Andrea Rotnitzky, PhD
